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  • Renegotiating Identity Markers in Contemporary Halling Practices
  • Anne Fiskvik (bio)

Changing Strategies in Contemporary Halling

Halling is a popular dance form used for centuries in Norway and Sweden but today is known as a folk dance in these countries and even elsewhere. This article considers how extensive touring and contact with different cultures and audiences informs contemporary theatrical halling practices and discourses. Drawing on my ongoing field-work on dance artists Hallgrim Hansegaard and Sigurd Johan Heide, whom I interviewed in 2017 and 2019, this article investigates how they and their ensembles, Frikar and Kartellet, negotiate and “remix” their so-called halling moves.1 The use of the term “remix” is inspired by Indian dance scholar Pallabi Chakravorty (2010). Writing on the rearticulation and transformation of the aesthetics and politics of Indian dances, Chakravorty claims that this new practice can be represented through the term “remix” (2010, 169). I am adapting it for this article, as it can be deemed as suitable to the description processes in contemporary halling practices, in which the traditional forms are added to and transformed. Chakravorty finds that within the remix practice “the notion of authentic, stable, or durable practice is replaced by a fluid, changeable, and ephemeral one” (169). Alongside this, I am inspired by dance scholar Karen Vedel’s writing (2014) about wayfinding artists—how dance practitioners who are on the move have to navigate a liquid modernity in which neither space nor time is fixed, thus they have a need for flexibility and adaptability. In short, I am interested in how fluidity and changeability are manifested in contemporary halling practices and discourse, and I aim to point out how these are being maneuvered by two dance artists whose artistic outcomes thrive on their migrational practices.

According to Sally Ann Ness (2008), migrational practices within various forms of dance are fueled and motivated by power relations, and they often require great amounts of both fuel and motivation to occur. These migrations can be seen to move within and through what Ness describes as fields of power, which exert influences and create pressures that move through obstacles and diversions while also facilitating features of their own (259–280). As will be pointed out, contemporary halling practices are situated in various power struggles, within Norway as well as within the dance field in general. There has been an ongoing process of relating nineteenth-century nationalism to the globalization of cultural production in twenty-first-century Europe, and the development of contemporary halling practices can be seen to be part of this. It also thrives on cultural diversity, on the remix of movements from different sources. [End Page 45]

There is nothing new about dance being inspired by cultural diversity. When the modern dancer Martha Graham choreographed her American Document in 1938, it was with the purpose of exploring the multicultural origins of the United States. Graham was concerned with how the landscape of American culture was shaped by a variety of human beings coming from various places in the world. At that time, in 1938, America was still welcoming refugees, as well as immigrants seeking better lives. Modern dance seemed fit to address issues of cultural diversity (Scolieri 2008). The history and the current situation of the halling are both similar and in opposition to that of Graham’s choreography. It has been recognized as a dance form that captures the essence of Norwegian (and Scandinavian) farm life. As such, the traditional halling field can perhaps be seen as having served as an antithesis to exploring what Scolieri coins “the multicultural origins of the nation” (ix). Rather than opening up for cultural diversity, the (unspoken) view has been that halling should serve to signify Norwegian cultural identity. Typical halling-moves have served as identity markers that ideally should stay the same as much as possible. In terms of achieving this goal, the field has been divided into two main camps: those who aim to let the halling remain an identity marker of Norwegian culture, and those who see halling as a springboard for “something new” (Fiskvik, 2013; Hammergren 2011, 185–187). Hansegaard and Heide have chosen to embrace diversity rather than tradition.

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